Wanda was a small kingdom when Warson was crowned at only eighteen summers past. Courageous and ruthless like a wild predator, he managed to conquer neighbouring fiefdoms, chiefdoms, and city-states. This was made even easier with his lack of any morality. Indeed, from ceremonies to rules of war, there was not a single thing Warson came to respect. There was but one thing: Power, and preferably the brute form at that.
Doubling the size of his small kingdom was merely the beginning. A decade and half more years, tens of thousands of dead bodies, tons and tons of steel, wood, and coal later his empire’s borders reached the sea on three sides, and the mountains in the last. He had united the south in the end.
Leira, the biggest city of its time, held the most strategic location on earth. Just north of then-called Leira Pass, River Nara ran from within the city, and the walls, built over the course of many centuries, controlled roads on both sides of the river that connected north to the south. With Argenta laying almost exactly south of the pass, and no other pass allowing as easy and smooth access, Warson’s next target wasn’t hard to guess even for a new-born.
The emperor spent three summers preparing for the attack. Leira was a magnificent city, and deserved such magnificent destruction. An army of three hundred thousand gathered at the mouth of the pass on the twenty seventh anniversary of Warson’s crowning. “Hand me the keys of the city and the head of your king, and I shall spare your lives. I give you three days to decide” spoke himself, at the southern gate, standing tall on his horse with ten thousand men behind, turned his back, and went back to the camp bigger than many cities – if not all.
If he was honest or not is unknown even today. He didn’t keep a diary, neither a chronicle has a comment by him. What’s known, though, is that no one, neither his contemporaries nor the latter generations believed in his honesty – hence didn’t the folk and leaders of Leira, and the siege began.
Anything and everything surrounding the city was set on fire. Farms, part of Black Forest which stretched all the way to the pass back in the day, empty grassland, even naked stone ground were all set on fire. It was but yellow, orange, and red for a month seen from the city, and but black, both of the land and of the armour, in the rest.
Three years the siege lasted. His last set of engineers, which replaced the decapitated previous ones, created better trebuchets and ballistae, and a breached western wall was all this bloodthirsty gang of slaughterers, waiting for the day for three years, needed. “None shall be killed yet. Tie them all up and bring them out” he ordered his thugs, which weren’t happy but scared to oppose.
Once the city was evacuated fully came the second order: The palace was razed to the ground and on its foundation was set a huge fire. Third and fourth orders sealed the fate of not only the Leirans but also of some of his own soldiers: Able bodied men and the rest are to be separated, and nothing, not even the most worthless piece of junk will be looted, neither for the soldier himself nor for the imperial treasury. All shall be razed to the ground and left under the rubble with no exceptions – be it diamonds, gold, or coin. Those disobeying shall be taken and treated no different than the enemy.
“What about women and children?”
“They need some entertainment. Provide them.”
Rape and murder, two greatest sins of human history, of hundreds of thousands, lasted from the end of the summer to mid-spring. The army didn’t move away from the city only except to cut wood for the fire, which ran even under rain and snow, and everything, living or not, vanished into thin air leaving behind ashes and dust.
One of those poor souls was Stephen. This rather insignificant man had preached love and peace all his life. By coincidence, or because his fate was so, he was in Leira when Warson made his warning. Having all the right to leave as some did, for he wasn’t a Leiran but was from a small village hundred and fifty miles north to north-west of it, he remained in the city, and was one of the last men to be burned at the stake. Having seen it all, he spoke two things, both from within the fire, one heard by few, and the other only by one. The latter, directed at the mighty emperor, was short and lot more direct than the other.
“He’ll plummet at the height of his might,
None will gaze at his rotten meat.
Trapped and laid in a stranger land,
Misery of millions will become his plight.”
Warson, a man fearing only himself, repeated these lines over the course of years a number of times as the chronicles recorded, yet no one ever claimed to have heard it.
Leira was a strong message to the north, but not the way Warson desired it to be. Few could leave the city, not after but before the siege, and none survived to warn the others. A united south didn’t find a united north, but surely would prefer had they been asked so.
Three plus ten years did southern armies ride the north. The results were devastating for everyone. Over a million people died on both sides, quadruple that much were physically and the rest were mentally wounded. None but one was unharmed in this decades-long madness: its creator. Warson was getting stronger, both physically and mentally, each and every day as if he was getting younger than older. And at the height of it he was found dead in his bed. Many would die to claim his life but the immortals left the job to none other. Warson died a happy death, leaving behind an unhappy world and a legend.
Two, actually.
